The European Commission has confirmed in a statement that it has approved 26 marketing programmes across 13 member states to provide information on and to promote agricultural products in the European Union.
According to the EC, the total budget for the programmes runs to €75.1m, of which the EU will contribute €37.6m, over a period of one to three years.
The selected programmes cover a wide range of products, including fruits and vegetables, PDOs, PGIs and TSGs, organic food and farming, horticulture, wine, milk and milk products, olive oil and table olives, eggs, seed oil and meat.
'European Union agricultural products are unique in their quality an
d diversity,' said Dacian Ciolos, Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development. 'In an increasingly open global market, it is not enough to produce excellent food and drink. We must increase efforts to communicate the standards and quality of European agricultural products to consumers. EU programmes of this kind are an effective way of helping our producers in an increasingly competitive world.'
Ciolos also confirmed that, in the wake of the recent E.coli outbreak, he had proposed a regulatory change which would enable professional organisations to submit additional promotional programmes for fresh fruit and vegetables in the single market and in third countries by 15 August this year, with an additional budget of €15m set aside for the initiative.
These extra promotional campaigns could be launched by the autumn, and will halve the usual adoption procedure normally associated with co-financed programmes, the EC revealed.
A full list of programmes and budgets for 2011 is available in the annex of the EC press release.
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